QNX just announced the SMP kit. The Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) Technology Development Kit allows you to achieve greater scalability, system density and performance in compute-intensive systems, such as network elements, encryption/decryption, transportation, medical imaging, storage.

The PDF contains this statement: Scale your systems transparently using the only realtime operating system (RTOS) to implement true SMP. That particular boast is a complete fiction: IRIX and Solaris are both realtime operating systems, and both have had "true SMP" for over ten years. Perhaps they meant that it's the only Canadian realtime operating system to implement true SMP?

I really don't think solaris is a realtime os.
A search on google showed nothing to indicate that it included realtime support.

And the way Irix does realtime support is a hack (http://www.sgi.com/software/react/features.html) . It require at least 2 processors where one run the "normal irix kernal and the non realtime software" while the other run the software that require realtime support. This does however support smp, so strictly speaking qnx are wrong, but it all depend on the definition of true smp. One could argue that because the irix solution require at least one processor to run the non-realtime part of irix it can't be called symmetric.

You have no clue what a RTOS is. Irix and Solaris are not RTOSes; they are aimed to serve a niche, not to be embedded in the control system of a nuclear power plant. There is a vast technology difference between QNX and something like Solaris.

OSNews seems to be attracting much more of the Slashdot element. For all you know, I've worked in real-time kernel development for a decade. Hell, for all you know, maybe I've even done real-time SMP kernel development at both QNX and Sun. Maybe I have, maybe I haven't -- the point is that it's not impossible, and you should avoid shooting your mouth off until you have some idea of whom you're accusing of having "no clue."

Irix and Solaris are not RTOSes; they are aimed to serve a niche, not to be embedded in the control system of a nuclear power plant. There is a vast technology difference between QNX and something like Solaris.

Solaris is an RTOS -- it offers pure, priority-based preemption via the RT scheduling class, processor sets, interrupt sheltering, arbitrary resolution interval timers via the CLOCK_HIGHRES POSIX clock, etc. And the claim that a "search on google showed nothing to indicate that it included realtime support" is false; googling "solaris real-time" has this as the fifth hit: